Changing Louisiana

This is an image of marsh grasses This is Lesson 1 of the Project Resilience curriculum.

Students are introduced to the anchoring phenomenon: that coastal Louisiana is changing, and people in the region are vulnerable for many reasons. Students use a cooperative learning strategy to discover how coastal change is affecting people in these communities, and create a driving question board to motivate further exploration of this topic through student-generated questions.

Learning Goals

  • Students will understand the scope of environmental challenges facing coastal Louisiana.
  • Students will discover questions they have about the effects of a changing coastal environment.

Materials

Preparation

  • Print copies of the Louisiana Coastal Stories - Jigsaw Student Note-Taking Sheet, one per student.
  • Bookmark the Louisiana coastal stories (links above) on computers or tablets.
    • Note: the transcripts of the coastal stories are provided in case playing the audio recordings is not possible, or if students would benefit from reading along while listening to the audio.
  • Read about facilitating the Jigsaw cooperative learning technique, if needed.
  • Read about creating a class Driving Question Board (DQB), if needed.

Directions

Introduce the anchoring phenomenon: Coastal Louisiana is changing, and people in the region are vulnerable for many reasons. (10 min)

  1. Project image of Fort Proctor (slide 3). Ask students:
    • What do you see? What do you notice? What does this make you think of? Ask if anyone has ever been to Fort Proctor?
  2. Orient students to the location of Fort Proctor (Fort Proctor map is also part of slide 3). Share background information (built in the 1850s and engulfed by Lake Borgne in the 1960s) as time and student interest dictates.
  3. Project the map of Last Island in 1853 and 1978 (slide 4). Ask students:
    • What do you see? What do you notice? What does this make you think of? Ask if anyone has ever been to Lost Island?
  4. Help students orient to the map by identifying locations in Terrebonne Parish. Point out the location of Last Island (“Isle Dernieres”) on both maps. Provide background about Last Island as time and student interest dictates, sharing that the 1856 hurricane resulted in extensive land loss. Optional: show the image of Last Island during the hurricane (provided in the Lesson 1 Resources folder).
  5. Share with students that Louisiana is considered to be in a “Coastal Crisis” and that every 100 minutes a football field of land disappears into the Gulf of Mexico.
  6. Transition the discussion to the range of environmental challenges faced in this area, in addition to land loss. Articulate the driving question (slide 5):
    • How is our changing coast affecting the people who live here?

Broaden to profile other examples of how coastal change is affecting people. (25 min)

Jigsaw activity:

  1. Arrange students into groups of six for the Jigsaw cooperative learning activity; these will be referred to as “home groups” during the jigsaw activity. Tell students that each person in their group will listen to a different news story about an environmental problem facing coastal Louisiana, and then take turns teaching the other members of their group about their story.
  2. Pass out a copy of the Louisiana Coastal Stories- Jigsaw Student Note-Taking Sheet to each student. Assign one student in each of the “home groups” to each of the coastal stories (there are six different stories, please adjust assignments as needed for your class size) and have them record the title of their assigned story on their note-taking sheet.
  3. Students break into “expert groups” to listen to and discuss their assigned stories. E.g., All students who were assigned “Sinking Louisiana: Studying Subsidence” will be in one expert group, all students who were assigned “Why do we measure wetland loss in football fields?” will be in another expert group, and so on. When students return to their “home groups,” each of them will have learned about a different story and be in charge of teaching their home group members what they have learned.
  4. Give each expert group a laptop or tablet and the link to their story so that they can listen to it together. Point out to students that the transcript for their story is also on the webpage with the recording, in case they would like to follow along or have difficulties playing the recording. Note: The story transcripts can also be printed from the links in the Materials list above.
  5. Instruct students to take notes on the Louisiana Coastal Stories- Jigsaw Student Note-Taking Sheet as they listen to their story. Project the jigsaw instructions and prompts (slide 6). As they discuss in their expert groups, prompt students to think about:
    • defining the problem
    • the causes of the problem
    • who is affected by the problem
    • how our community might be affected by this problem
  6. After 10 minutes, have students return to their home groups to share what they have learned. “Experts” take turns briefly sharing with their home group. Encourage students to discuss connections between various problems, and to write down any questions that come up for them on page 2 of the Jigsaw student note-taking sheet.

Create a Driving Question Board to capture questions students have about Louisiana’s coastal crisis. (10 min)

  1. Pass out sticky notes to each student. Ask them to generate questions, on their own, that they have about the problems facing the coast based on the coastal stories they have learned about today, or based on previous knowledge/experiences. Tell students to write each of their questions on a separate sticky note.
  2. Have students come together to share the questions they have generated on a Driving Question Board (DQB) for the class. Use a large piece of chart paper, or a bulletin board, and write the unit driving question at the top:
    • How is our changing coast affecting the people who live here?

     

    Display the Driving Question Board in a public place that the students will have access to throughout the unit. You could also consider creating a digital Driving Question Board, as long as students will easily be able to view and modify it throughout the unit.

  3. Consider having everyone stand and gather around the DQB, bringing their sticky notes with them. Have students take turns reading their questions aloud and then post their sticky notes on the DQB. You will likely notice patterns or commonalities emerge among questions as they are shared. Call attention to this and move the sticky notes around to sort them into groups. You might consider asking if anyone else has a similar or related question to one that has already been posted to aid in the sorting process.
  4. Use the DQB as a way to motivate students to learn more about our topic (coastal change and resilience). Find a way to connect a question or group of questions on the DQB to the topic of the next lesson (deltaic formation). If there are questions about land loss, or why the land is sinking, focus student attention here. For example: “To learn about why land is being lost, we must first learn about how it formed...this is the focus of our next lesson!”
  5. Tell students that we will return to the DQB throughout the unit, and give students permission to add new questions as they think of them.

Introduce Resilience Journaling (5 min)

  1. Explain that students will complete a reflective journaling assignment as a wrap up to each activity in the unit. There is a prompt provided for each day that correlates with the lesson. Students should complete journaling assignments throughout the unit to record their thinking and process their responses to the challenging and complex topics explored in the curriculum. Read about journaling in Project Resilience and access the complete list of all 18 journal prompts.

    Note: Journals are intended to be completed out of class. The time needed for a thoughtful response is not included within the planned 50 minute class period. If you do not typically assign homework to your students, consider journals as an optional activity.
  2. Assign today’s journal prompt. Read journal prompt #1 together and clarify expectations for journal responses. Consider sharing the Journal Scoring Rubric with students if you will be scoring journal responses.

Journal Prompt #1: Think about the environmental challenges facing coastal Louisiana that were presented today. Choose one of these issues and zoom in to focus on one small part of the problem that is important to you. Describe that one small part as if it was the only problem. Why is it important to you? What questions do you have about it? Now zoom out and consider the small part in the context of a bigger problem. How do your feelings about the problem change when you consider it on a larger scale?

 

 

Background

Fort Proctor

  • Fort Proctor is a ruined 19th-century fort in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, USA. The fort is on the shore of Lake Borgne just north of the mouth of Bayou Yscloskey. The fort was intended to be part of the fortifications protecting water routes towards New Orleans. Due to delays caused by hurricane damage, and then the outbreak of the American Civil War, the fort was never garrisoned. By the end of the Civil War, improvements in artillery had made the design of the fort obsolete.
  • The construction of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal in the 1960s cut off all land access to the fort site. Now surrounded by water about one foot deep, the fort can only be seen in the distance from Shell Beach, Louisiana. Before Hurricane Katrina, there remained one small piece of dry land inside of the fort
  • In 1978, Fort Proctor was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
  • Videos about Fort Proctor
This is a drawing that shows flooding of the town during the Last Island Hurricane of 1856.

Storm surge during the 1856 hurricane is responsible for significant land loss on Last Island.

Last Island

Last Island (also known as Isle Dernière), off the Louisiana coast, was a long barrier island off the west side of Terrebonne Bay and a vacation destination with a large resort. The force of an 1856 hurricane broke it into many smaller islands, which today are collectively called the Isles Dernieres. Flooded by storm surge during the hurricane, much of the land and wetlands became eroded during the storm. Today, the Isles Dernieres islands that remain include much less land and wetland areas. Isles Dernieres Barrier Islands Refuge legally protects many of these islands.

About the environmental challenges profiled in the Louisiana coastal stories that students read in this lesson:

  • Hydrologic Modification: Hydrologic modification is considered a “linchpin” problem of the basins, and indicates that all other issues revolve around it, and are often affected by it. When we build levees, dredge canals, or cut through natural ridges, the natural flow of water is changed. In some cases, such changes accelerate erosion. Other times it can result in changed salinity of water bodies. As a result, a freshwater marsh can transition to a more “salt-tolerant” type. In more extreme cases, marshland can be converted to open water.
  • Sediment Reduction and Subsidence: Historically, the Mississippi River provided the sediment that Louisiana marshes need to survive. Now, however, levees confine the sediment to the river, bypassing the marshes, and ultimately deposit it on the continental shelf in the Gulf. Our coastal marshland continuously undergoes a natural process called “subsidence,” which results in the land slowly sinking. In the past, the rate of sediment building equaled or surpassed the rate of sinking, and the marsh remained at sea level.
  • Habitat loss: The rate of habitat conversion and land loss in the coastal areas of the Barataria and Terrebonne basins is alarmingly high. According to a 2010 USGS study about land area change in coastal Louisiana, the Barataria Terrebonne Estuary System (BTES) has lost a total of 865.57 square miles since 1935.
  • Global Sea Level Rise Due to Climate Change: Global (or eustatic) sea level rise is one of the most well-known consequences of climate change. There are two ways that higher temperatures cause higher sea levels: (1) melting ice sheets and glaciers and (2) thermal expansion of seawater. Since 1900, sea level has risen between 1 and 2 millimeters per year (10-20 cm or 3.9-7.9 inches per century) on average.
  • Changes in Living Resources: Living Resources, the animals that live in the estuary, are dependent on these diverse habitats. Approximately 735 species of birds, frogs, shellfish, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals spend all or part of their life cycle in the estuary. Several of the species are categorized either as threatened or endangered. Many factors contribute to declines in animal populations that live in the shallow ocean, in the wetlands, and on land.
  • Changes to water quality:
    • Eutrophication: When too many nutrients, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, are in the water, a condition known as eutrophication occurs. The process begins with the accelerated growth of algae. As algae and plant matter decay, oxygen in the water is depleted, killing fish and shellfish.
    • Pathogens: Pathogens are disease-producing organisms, such as bacteria and viruses. The sources of these organisms are human waste, pasture runoff from animal waste, and waste products of marsh animals, such as nutria and birds. Bacteria commonly found in sewage pollution can be of serious concern as it causes infection, rashes, and other serious diseases. Vibrio bacteria can cause both foodborne and wound-related illnesses.
    • Toxic Substances: Water, animal tissue, and sediment testing have identified a variety of toxic substances in the basins. Some are known cancer-causing agents, while others affect reproduction. Toxic concentration is magnified when some animals consume contaminated food. Human consumption of highly contaminated seafood also poses health risks. Toxins found throughout the system come from point sources, such as industry, and non-point sources, such as urban runoff.

Note: The news stories that students explore as a part of this activity are not intended to give a comprehensive overview of all environmental problems facing the Gulf Coast. Future lessons in Project Resilience will allow students to dive in-depth into a variety of resilience challenges, including, but are not limited to, those explored in this lesson. The objective is for students to end this lesson with an understanding that our coastal environment is changing and how this affects humans.

Related Resources

An icon of marsh grasses

Credits

This activity was developed for Project Resilience, funded by the National Academies’ Gulf Research Program.